So far, every author that we have come across so far has had their own interpretation of interpretation, or the way in which we understand and classify things. The statement found in Modern Literary Theory, “Though the concepts of ideology, the unconscious, the signifier, and the sex-gender distinction, are often simply assumed as givens in the contemporary theory..” showed a the authors Marx, Engels, Freud, Saussure and Beauvoir tendency to draw their own interpretation in a given situation.
Chandler and Fish’s thoughts are similar in the sense that they both explain how genres may be determined. As Fish stated in his essay “It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the emergence of poetic qualities”. This goes hand in hand with Chandler’s “problem of definition and the ways we classify media into a genre according to common characteristics. From Working with genres, Chandler states, “ Genre provides an important frame of reference which help readers identify, select, and interpret text.” Genre gives us a reason to not think or question. For instance, a poem is a poem. It gives us the expectations to see certain elements that make a poem what is. However, Chandler also said that genres limit the way a text is interpreted. He also said, “ Challenging too many conventional expectations for the genre could threaten the integrity of the text.” This creates an argument that genre classification, a natural human action, is bad. But how else are we supposed to classify things?
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It is very interesting to consider the act of classifying texts and movies into genre as something bad. Although I did not notice this before, it does seem like the authors of the texts we have just read, especially Chandler, percieve the notion of genre as something negative. Although Fish and Eagleton do not explicitly talk about genres, they both believe that the interpretation of a text is mostly up to the reader. If this is indeed true, then the idea that the genre largely influences the way a person reads something is paradoxical. If a person interprets a text in their own way, the simple categorizing of that text into a genre should not widely influence the way they read it.
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